It's Official: America's Great At Making Stuff, Including Some Of The World's Greatest Writers

Although we live in a technological age in which we are continually bombarded with sounds and images from every angle, reading books is still key in our society. It has been so for centuries; the great thinkers of humanity put their ideas into writing for the benefit of all. And America has produced a plethora of great artists whose musings are still studied today. Let's explore the top 10 most influential American writers.

Due to the large numbers of great men and women to choose from, my name, as well as legendary ones like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Henry Miller, had to be excluded. We'll rely on the following criteria to ensure fairness. The writer must:

Have been born in the United States

Be esteemed by his peers

No longer be alive

Have his work studied

Have influenced other media or pop culture

10: Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

The African-American father of the civil rights movement was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, in Maryland. His mother being a slave, he had no choice but to become one himself. He worked hard on the plantation and lived amidst constant cruelty. At the age of seven, he was sent to live with one of his master's relatives in Baltimore. Mrs. Auld was kind to him and taught the child how to read and write, until her husband put a stop to it. When he reached 20 years of age, he managed to escape to New York and started attending abolitionist rallies.

With instinctive eloquence, he addressed the crowd and told his story as a fugitive slave. A few years later, he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, and it became a huge success, being translated into French and German. He also wrote for newspapers, always being sure to stress the inhumanity of slavery. His book, along with his subsequent autobiographies My Bondageand My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, contributed to the passing of the Emancipation Proclamation and to the inclusion of African-American soldiers in the Civil War.

Famous work: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Famous excerpt:"Will not a righteous God visit for these things?"

9: Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

Thomas "Tennessee" Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, to a family full of problems. In addition to his father's abusive behavior and his sister Rose's schizophrenia, young Thomas was often ridiculed for being effeminate, so he pretty much kept to himself while growing up. He escaped solitude by writing and drinking, and became a professional playwright in 1939 when literary agent Audrey Wood took him under her wing.

Success came in 1945 after he transformed a failed movie screenplay into The Glass Menagerie, a play that won him the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. An alcoholic hypochondriac, he wrote plays about wounded members of dysfunctional Southern families, always frank in exploring the deepest human desires; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Rose Tattoo being prime examples. Nine of his plays have been adapted into feature films.

Famous work:A Streetcar Named DesireFamous excerpt: "What you're talking about is brutal desire — just desire! The name of that rattle-trap of a street-car that bangs through the Quarter, up one old narrow street and down another."

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